Review: The Pink Pigeon Original Rum

Rum is a spirit imbued with exoticism. It comes from places in tour guides like Barbados. Panama. Martinique.

Pink Pigeon puts all of that to shame. It is born in Mauritius, which I guarantee you will never find on a map. It’s here: A speck of an island over 1000 miles off the southeast coast of Africa — out there beyond Madagascar.

Pink Pigeon doesn’t just have an unusual provenance, it also has a unique recipe. Quadruple distilled from molasses, it is “gently” aged, then infused with botanicals, gin-style: Bourbon vanilla, orange peel, and — wait for it — orchids are used to flavor the rum before bottling.

This is — to say the least — as unique a rum as you’ll find on the market. The vanilla is the most visible and authentic part of the spirit. It’s big on the nose and rich like real vanilla extract — not artificially sweet like a Vanilla Coke. The vanilla powers — substantially — over the other characters of the rum. This is amazingly powerful — and it does make for a fantastic mixer with cola — but it does take something away from the rum itself. I couldn’t tell you much of anything about what this rum really tastes like. It is so overwhelming with vanilla that the more delicate sweetness of the rum is left far behind. You can get hints of the orange peel and even some floral notes in there, but on the whole this is a vanilla bean world. We just live in it.